- Winner of "Award of Merit" by the IndieFEST Film Awards, August 2018
CURRENTLY BEING SUBMITTED TO FESTIVALS. UPDATES SOON.
01
THE FILM
“Uncanny, The Dolls of Mariana Monteagudo” is a short documentary about renowned Venezuelan visual artist currently residing in Florida, Mariana Monteagudo; her creative process and her inspirations behind her intriguing, eerie and culturally hybrid doll sculptures, all made of repurposed materials that were originally waste. In the film, we join Mariana into dumpster diving and visiting local thrift shops; closely following her through the creation of her new doll series “Uncanny”, where topics like capitalism, immigration, consumerism, maternity, contemporary art, terror and upcycling are explored.
Coming from a strong family tradition of ceramists in Venezuela, Mariana loves giving a second life to objects that are discarded by our society. Like a waste picker, she walks around neighborhoods to salvage gems from people's bulk trashes, rescuing textiles or baseball balls, plastic bottles of orange juice or an old unkempt teddy bear. Mariana also visits local thrift stores looking for unwanted objects that may excite her creativity, contributing with the processes of upcycling and reuse. To her, everything has potential for inspiration and hybridism, and that's the way she lives her life: continuously seeking, always resuscitating abandoned things, permanently combining and thinking ahead of time and placing her faith into the most unimagined creations. But when you see those dolls, everything makes sense, and a magical symbiosis is initiated, resulting in the reflection of today’s globalized and interconnected world.
This film was shaped by a one-woman-band crew / Produced by The Lunch Box Studio / Duration: 28:36min
IMDB page here.
02
MARIANA
MONTEAGUDO
"Award winning Sculptor Mariana Monteagudo is a Miami based artist who has been working her series of doll sculptures over the last decade. Her latex, ceramic and mixed-media figures are unique, intriguing and fascinating. Her artwork shows interest in a wide range of references, from the pre-Columbian aesthetics, to fashion, TV pop culture, Japanese manga and mass-market toys.
Muñecas (Dolls) is the generic term Monteagudo uses to describe her creations since 1998. With them, the artist has received important awards and exposure, and her pieces have been featured in solo and group shows and fairs in Madrid, Miami, Chicago, Aruba, Caracas, New York, Sao Paulo, and other venues. Her unusual characters have attracted the attention of critics and her work is part of the MOLAA Museum in California, Everson Museum, NY, Cesar Gaviria Trujillo Collection, among other contemporary art collections."
- Evelyne Politanoff, THE HUFFINGTON POST
“My art comes from being in contact with my surroundings. You arrive as an immigrant, you get the outsider viewpoint, you try to take advantage of the materials that are around, and from that you nourish yourself. That's where all my work comes from. Thus, by being in contact with my environment, I end up worrying about the social issues. But that is the “result of”. There it lies the core of my work.”
- Mariana Monteagudo
For a detailed list of her exhibitions, please click here.
For updated information about Mariana, follow @mariana_monteagudo.
03
ELAINE
MINIONIS
Elaine was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1980, and graduated in Literature at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas; program that also involved an intense study in History and History of Art, Philosophy and Languages.
In parallel, her interests for documentary photography and filmmaking was being nourished by many independent courses taken since 2000 in Venezuela and in the University of the Arts in London, allowing her to work, exhibit and publish her documentary photographs several times. In 2006, a Venezuelan filmmaker saw her photography work, and fascinated by her eye, asked her to work on a 20th Century Fox production: “Elipsis”, as the advertising, making-of and still photographer; a movie that allowed her to work with the most important talents in Venezuela.
Throughout this dual and never quarreled inclination towards images and words, she decided to pursue Documentary Filmmaking in 2008 at the New York Film Academy, where non-fiction visual storytelling became an artistic and intellectual space that allowed her to explore the humane by combining creative writing and deep research, with her instinctive motivation for visual aesthetics and photography.
After graduating, she worked at the Brooklyn-based production company Flicker Flacker Films, as an intern and then as the assistant editor for a History Channel feature-length documentary "The Naturalized", having the opportunity to work with the important Emmy-winner documentarian Aaron Lubarsky. After being accepted for an internship and then as independent producer at Discovery Networks Latin America/US Hispanics in the Original Production & Development Department, she moved to Miami, where she currently resides.
In 2011, Elaine co-founded The Lunch Box Gallery; a small but vibrant and cutting edge creative space devoted to artistic contemporary photography in the Wynwood Art District of Miami. The gallery closed in 2014, and she continued working in commercial photography with The Lunch Box Studio. In parallel, Elaine pursues her own stories and documentaries; being the latest one, "Uncanny: The Dolls of Mariana Monteagudo".
For her full resume and full website of her work, please click here.